Mix and Match
by Tisaniere
Summary: Sherlock thinks of boarding school as a prison in which to make his own entertainment. He's just out of hospital, ready to return to school and wreak havoc. John finds a sense of purpose and place at St Bartholomew's that he never found at home. He wants to just get on. John is a puzzle Sherlock wants to solve. Sherlock is the most fascinating thing in the world to John.


Something I wrote in a splurge of energy. Let me know what you think!

* * *

The summer was ending, and John Watson wasn't all that displeased about it. There were some moments when he wanted it to never finish, to have the days stretch forever with nothing to do. He'd tried to spend as little time as possible at home. It was just better that way. The shadow of Dad hung heavily over the house. His Mum was tense and angry all the time, and didn't seem to want him around much. All he had to do was sit on the sofa and she was there trying to tidy him up, bustling him into doing some errand or another. Ever since his Dad had died, inactivity became her biggest sin. She never stopped moving, always busy, always angrily prodding and poking and criticising. Harry clearly felt the same. She was never there either, although she spent her summer hanging out on the high street drinking with friends.

John's summer, on the other hand, was infinitely better. Since his Mum didn't seem to notice that he wasn't there, he spent weeks on end at various friends' houses. That was the great thing about the school he'd spent the last year at; his new friends and classmates had the best places to spend the summer.

Mike Stamford's parents had a huge house in the country outside of London, and John would spend weeks at a time there lying out on the hot grass, watching the sky turn from blue to gold. They fished, slept out in the barn stuffed with haystacks, played with Mike's dog Silver, and borrowed knives from Mike's Granddad's shed to whittle things out of the half dead branches they tugged from trees in the woods.

Occasionally interrupting this country idyll was time with friends who lived in London. Tom, whose South African parents were a banker and a lawyer and lived in the luxury of South Kensington, let them crash at his for days on end when his parents were on work trips. The Philippine maid watched them silently as she hovered around the house, but as far as John could tell she never reported back to her employer on what their teenage son got up to.

Tom had the latest Xbox games and everything a teenage boy could want. Sometimes they never opened the curtains, playing endless rounds of Call of Duty.

It did get sort of boring for John, a boy who liked to be active, but he enjoyed a new sense of belonging. It was different to when they were all lumped together at school. They had to get along, or they'd all go insane. Out in the real world, these guys still wanted to talk to him. He was secretly pleased. He had only been St Bartholomew's on his scholarship for a year, and he'd made fast friends. They went to a few house parties, mates of Tom who didn't attend Bartholomew's. They seemed older these kids, more street wise, and John quite enjoyed the thrill of drinking cheap vodka in their living rooms whilst their parents were out at black tie galas at Westminster. He kissed a few girls, got a bit drunk. And at the end of it all, he retreated with Mike back to the Stamford estate in the middle of nowhere and played endless games of catch with Silver.

Then, the rain came. The skies boiled over with clouds too thick for light to penetrate. The rain was never anything exciting, never lashing to the windows so that John could lie in bed and at least pretend he was somewhere interesting: out on a ship in the middle of the sea, a castaway on a dessert island. No, it just drizzled.

Mike Stamford's garden lost its allure. The river was starting to flood and they couldn't go into the woods any more. The parties were fuller, more people having come back from their school holidays. John found himself hating more and more of them. He'd kissed all of the girls he'd wanted to kiss, drunk all the booze he wanted to. He was starting to get sick of cigarettes but didn't feel like he could turn them down.

Eventually, he retreated back home. The rain had driven Harry back to the nest too, and so they sat on the sofa in the grey front room of their grey row house and wound each other up endlessly.

John loved his sister, and was the guy who everyone found the easiest to get along with. That was why after only a year at Bartholomew's he was so generally popular. But Harry rubbed him up the wrong way and vice versa.

In the end, he took to hiding out in his room reading.

So that was why he was torn between his longing for the summer to end and his desire to go back to school. It had been a heady summer of freedom. Now the clouds had closed in and the house was suffocating him. He'd find more freedom at school, and he was desperate for it.

His bags were all packed on the morning of the first day. He felt bad when after breakfast his Mum followed him upstairs, with an armful of newly laundered clothes, determined to help him pack. Her face fell a bit at the sight of everything already neatly folded in the suitcases. She recovered quickly enough. She squashed a twenty pound note into his rucksack when she thought he wasn't looking, and took more interest than was necessary in the letters from school about the new academic year. They'd all arrived weeks ago, but she had never glanced at them before, even when John left them meaningfully all over the kitchen table.

He was bursting by the time he had to head to the station. Sod summer, he needed to go back to school. No more grey, cold house, no more of his Mum unable to sit down for fear a moment of calm would bring something bad to the front of her mind. He wanted to wash himself completely of the smell of his Dad that seemed to permeate the living room sofa.

Harry didn't come to the station with him. She nudged his shin with the toe of her Doc Marten as a goodbye, told him not to come back at Christmas acting like such a posh toff, and disappeared. His Mum insisted on driving him to the station, and even got out of the car when they arrived.

"Mum, I'm fine."  
"I know you are, love. Give us a kiss."

He gave a sort of half grimace, half smile when she hugged him.

She never mentioned their Dad, ever. But John had a terror deep inside him that one day she would, as though it was just on the tip of her tongue. So, like he did every time he was left alone with his Mum, he did his best to hurry away as quickly as he could. Just in case.

He had one suitcase, his big rucksack he had bought to move to school a year ago, and another smaller drawstring bag for the long train journey. He insisted he could manage it all, and left his Mum in the car park, clutching her keys to her chest and waving every now and again, but only when his back was turned.

John loved his Mum, his sister. He definitely did. But summer was definitely over, and if it had to be, then he wanted to be back at school.

No-one was in danger of mentioning his Dad, no-one wound him up like his sister could, no-one made him feel like a heavy weight was sat on his chest.

Everything and everyone would be exactly the same as last year.

* * *

For some reason, Mycroft had got it into his head that how Sherlock looked _mattered_. Sherlock couldn't understand why.

"Yes, I do in fact grasp the concept of first _impressions_, I just don't see why they _matter_ so much to you," Sherlock snapped back at his brother. Sherlock tossing his words back at him always irked Mycroft so. So Sherlock did it at every possible opportunity. As a child - a little boy who looked at Mycroft like he was the sun, moon and everything else that would ever matter to him - he would repeat everything Mycroft said. With love, with due care and attention, cradling everything and storing it away so that it could be slowly used to build himself higher and higher. Build him higher out of Mycroft's affectionate scorn, out of his parents tedious talk at the table that drove him so mad. He wanted so desperately to be like Mycroft that imitation was his way of showing that love.

Now he just used it to wind his brother up

"How can you talk to me about impressions?" Sherlock said eventually, filling the space where Mycroft was supposed to have shown just how annoyed his brother had made him. Clearly he was suppressing, strongly, that particular desire.

"After all, I'd say that _this_ has grown over the summer," Sherlock finished with a flourish, patting his older brother on the stomach. The jumper was the soft wool relaxed by their mother's detergent. It was soon be stiff and itchy like everything else washed in the school's laundrette.

Mycroft knocked his hand away but knew better than to react physically any further to Sherlock's provocation. Much to Mycroft's disdain, it had become clear the minute Sherlock hit puberty that he'd beat Mycroft in a fight any day. They rarely scrapped these days but when they did it was explosive. Sherlock scared him, then. He was all limbs and angles and a grip that could frighten the strongest man. He had big hands and when he wouldn't let go, Mycroft had to admit that he felt panic. Then Mummy would come in and tell them off and Sherlock would roll away, something sardonic on his lips, knowing he had won, even though he took no pleasure in winning physically. He wanted to best his brother mentally. That was their playing field.

Mycroft decided ignoring Sherlock was the best way to go – it usually was – and settled with watching the scenery pass the car window.

They hadn't always boarded at Bartholomew's. They didn't live that far away really, under an hour's drive and their Mum had always been there to pick them up at the end of the day with the other mothers. A few years ago though, Mr Holmes had found himself travelling more and more with work. It just seemed easier this way.

Except for last year. When Sherlock had been ill. Sherlock hadn't gone to school, hadn't been anywhere apart from inside the four walls of a hospital, or his own bedroom, under the covers.

Mycroft couldn't understand why Sherlock was in such a good mood. He would have thought the impending tedium of going back to school would bring out the worst in him.

'Relapse' was on the tip of everyone's tongue. Plonking him back into an environment that was exactly the same as before, all the same faces, a routine and the same boring rooms and corridors as the years before. Surely that was detrimental. Not that anyone listened to Mycroft.

The older Holmes boy sat back in his seat and dreamed of all of the things he would do the day people did listen to him. And smiled.

Sherlock peered at Mycroft's supercilious smile suspiciously. A happy Mycroft was a dangerous Mycroft. Sherlock needed complete control over this situation if he was going to make it work. He needed his brother to play his part and keep him here. Because if there was anywhere in the world that he needed to be, it was at school. Of course, there were a million other places he should be. But when Sherlock totted them up on a piece of paper on the wall of his room, he realised he had few practical choices. Between school, hospital, and home, school won. The people were dull but he could make his own fun. He always had before. Still, the same roll of boring, blank faces was starting to appear in his vision. He remembered all of their names to the letter. Jameson, Kim, Letterson, Peters, Dobelli, Duchamp…

* * *

"Watson. John Watson."

The PE teacher looked John up and down.

'You know me,' John thought, suppressing his inner sigh, that face that his Mum said made him look like a grumpy old man, 'I played on your football team all of last year.'

The PE teacher had clearly been drinking the night before, and hadn't expected to be given any sort of duties of the first day of term. Yet here he was, with a clipboard and a hangover. He'd put on too much deodorant and eaten too many mints to try to cover the smell of alcohol, but now the smell he had created was giving him a headache.

"Oh yes. Watson," he said, pretending to twig the name.

He looked down at the piece of paper. He could feel Mrs Brown's disapproving stare at the back of his neck as she dealt with not one, not two, but three students all at once. His side of the queue was slow, moving at snail's pace as his hangover blurred the words on the paper.

"You're upstairs, Watson. Top floor."

"Top floor?"

The top floor was usually reserved for seniors. He was only a year off that, but the upstairs rooms in the far off reaches of the House building was a final year privilege.

Mr Spacer shrugged at him expansively. He had no clue why, either.

"If you'll remember, Mr Spacer, there were only a few sixth formers in Hudson House this year, so we moved them over to Hooper House," Mrs Brown interjected, crisply.

Mr Spacer shrugged again, because he couldn't care less, and waved James Watson or whatever his name was away.

John joined Mike on the Hudson House stairs. The year 7s, nervous twelve year olds, had arrived a week ago. They were peering down at the older boys from their bedrooms at the front of the house on the first floor, hiding behind the curtains, their slowly built sense of confidence slowly fading in the eyes of the older, taller boys below.

"Are you on the top floor too?"

"No. I'm right at the bottom of your stairs though."

"I'm on the top floor," a voice said, passing them on the stairs.

"Oh, hey Gavin."

Lestrade nodded at them both as he passed, moving away now he had shared his only piece of conversation for the moment. He was quiet like that, Gavin, but never shy. John liked that about him.

John felt quite chuffed at being on the top floor. The rooms were bigger, further away from the prying eyes and ears of the House Masters and Mistresses rooms on the ground floor. Further away from the younger kids, from the noise and clatter of common rooms. Hudson House was the smallest of the lot, and he'd grown fond of the slightly rambling old building. Getting a coveted top floor room was definitely a bonus. Still, he had no idea who he was sharing with. There were four rooms up there, and he doubted he'd be lucky enough to get Lestrade as a roommate. Between them, Mike and John got their stuff upstairs. Mike gave him a hand getting his stuff up the narrow staircase to the top floor rooms then left him to it, mumbling something about needing to call his Mum to tell him he was there safely. John hadn't even thought of that. Later, he decided.

His name was on a piece of card tucked into the little bracket on the door.

J Watson

Behind it was another card. The name of his roommate. He gave the corridor a quick look up and down, then pulled the card out.

S Holmes

Who was Holmes? Was that that weird kid Simon with the parents where always 'on holiday'. No, his second name was Simms. Well Sandeep's second name wasn't Holmes, and he couldn't for the life of him think of anyone else in the year who lived in Hudson House.

Holmes sounded familiar though. Wasn't that the name of that guy in the year above them?

He shouldered open the door, resolving that he'd just have to wait and see who S Holmes was. There's no doubt he'd know him, somehow. He knew everyone in his year, especially in Hudson. Maybe he'd been put with a younger kid. He hoped not.

Just as long as this Holmes guy wasn't too weird, it'd be fine.


End file.
